Look closely at one of Maruta Racenis' charcoal drawings of a Virginia landscape and you could be surprised by its depth and muscle.

Grabbing your eye with her ambitious scale, the Richmond artist pulls you into the intimate space formed by an overhanging canopy of trees, then sends you down a narrow road that plunges over the unseen side of a steeply falling hill.

You'll find an equally compelling experience in Lynchburg artist Ron Boehmer's oil-on-paper views of river islands and stands of trees drawn from western Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley. Only here the forces that tug your eye so insistently across his small but commanding landscapes are not impressive size and arresting gesture but a calculating brush and smartly handled color.

These are just two of the visions that unfold, however, in a Peninsula Fine Arts Center show that explores the vast face of the Commonwealth with variety and vigor.

Made up of 40 works by 11 artists, "The Virginia Landscape: Works on Paper" takes you from the Chesapeake Bay to the mountains, embracing marshes, farms, woodlands and urban scenes. It also ranges from drawings and oil on paper to watercolors and prints — plus an array of approaches that stretches from the traditional realistic landscape scene to the metaphorical and near-abstract.

Among the most familiar images here is a group of about half-a-dozen Chesapeake Bay watercolor scenes painted by Maryland artist Marc Castelli.

As you might expect, most focus on grassy marshes and old deadrise workboats. But the best also pay so much attention to the behavior of light and the visual impact of abstract shapes that they rise far above the vast, mostly plodding realm of instantly forgettable boat pictures.

In "Swamped/Tangier," Castelli combines an unusual vantage point with an idiosyncratic hull, then captures his subject at a moment when it's perched crazily above a flood tide on three oil drums.

What results is a portrait that's as much about the strips of color and sculptural forms you see as the boat itself — and these elements not only grab the eye but also give unexpected complexity to his likeness.

Similar ambition marks "Private Sargasso, Oyster, Va.," where Castelli focuses on the long, lean lines of an abandoned deadrise left to rot on the shoreline — then showcases them at the striking moment when the chalky old white paint begins to gleam in the near-blinding sun.

Bounded by a low-lying blanket of greenery in front and a dense curtain of trees to the rear, the elongated sheer of the hull combines with its hard chines and sharp bow to stand out as manmade creations stranded in an encroaching sea of natural textures. That just adds to the elegiac bent of what, in other hands, might have been a far less accomplished and much more sentimental picture.

Hampton artist Scott Stanard likes to complicate and enrich ordinary landscape scenes, too, but he draws his best subjects from the simple roadside sights he encounters in such urban environments as Hilton Village andPhoebus.

Sometimes he uses unexpected vantage points and angles to create perspectives that make his familiar subjects seem fresh and new. His elevated view of the vintage streetfront buildings in "Phoebus Pawn Shop" is a good example, forcing viewers to look up at the lines of utility wires racing across the sky as well as the pattern and shapes of the letters at play in a straightforward but animated vertical sign.

His edgy drypoint prints also use the most minimal means to suggest various architectural forms and the changing effects of light, resulting in austere little worlds that teem with black and white and lots of brooding, mysterious shadows. Then there are such details as the row of winter trees that towers over a street in "Hilton Village Sunday Morning," where the leafless reaching branches provide an evocative, almost narrative contrast to the jumble of geometric planes formed by the walls, windows and roofs of the houses.

Exactly what all these veiled visual clues are saying about the neighborhood and its inhabitants is left unclear. But you can't help turning away feeling that this is a place filled with untold stories.

Erickson can be reached at merickson@dailypress.com and 247-4783. Find him at dailypress.com/entertainment/arts and Facebook.com/dpentertainment.